Agreed completely. I think the licensing model is the issue, and if you look on this page alone people who have had to pay all say it was because of a mistake rather than as something they did because the money gave their company an advantage.

Also, I've personally tried out Qt a few different companies over the years and several of them would have been fine paying $50-200/dev/year (depending on company size), but the current price starts at $5508/dev/year! This is so much higher than Jetbrains or Visual Studio pricing that it's clearly targeting a market other than normal developers. This creates an awkwardness for Qt in my opinion. They want to build a community of developers to encourage and grow use of Qt, but most developers in the community are priced out from participating outside of open source.